Merry Christmas!

This has been a tricky year in many respects. My depression surged back into play, which meant my desire to do anything was sapped. So I was back on the anti-depressants - a new one this time, Sertraline. It has helped my mood, but I'm still not getting a great deal done. Exercise has been sporadic at best, and shifts at work have meant that I've missed every book club meeting at my library this year. Shifts are changing as of now, but the last meeting of the book club was, er, the last one. Inevitably.

Work has been consuming a lot of my time. I like things set and predictable (on which more in a moment), and there has been such fluidity in staffing that this has been nigh on impossible. On the one hand, it looks as though things will at last settle down. On the other, I really need to force myself out of my comfort zone and into a different job with better pay and prospects, which inevitably means more hours.

A while ago a friend recommended to me that I should get myself checked out, and the other week the assessment rolled around. I have Asperger's. It was something I had rather suspected ever since he'd suggested it, although if you'd told me it a year ago, I should have been quite sceptical. A lot of things I had assumed were sensations everyone (or a great many people) experienced are not. For instance, I presume now that most of my readers cannot imagine how incredibly, viscerally unpleasant tobacco and marijuana smell to me. Likewise, the reason I always feel too warm in surroundings comfortable to others is because I have as marked a hyposensitivity to cold as I have a hypersensitivity to odours.

While I was unsure what benefit this knowledge could have prior to the diagnosis, it has been somewhat reassuring, and suggested a few things I can do to attempt to alter my situation for the better. It's also good to know that all the time I have spent thinking other people are nuts has been subjectively right. As the doctor said, I tend to stay close to the rules, which means I am likely to be more technically correct than many others. As Hermes Conrad's superior says in Futurama "[T]echnically correct - the best kind of correct". Boom-boom! I am not forgetting that they (you?) have been subjectively right about me being crazy, mind you.

One of the particular elements of this condition that is really apparent to me is my love of detail, routine and plans. I can go "off-script", but it's unpleasant. Maybe it's like having an angry sergeant shouting in your ear while you're trying to play chess. Who knows? So moving from one routine to another is arduous. On the other hand, I know from past experience that I can make overnight changes to existing routines, which alterations I will cling to more stubbornly than an amorous puppy might cling to an embarrassed socialite's leg. So there's hope.

There is perforce a "but". The qualifier here is that I don't understand things, and I fail to grasp them in such a fundamental way that nobody can work out how to help me do them. For instance, talking to the fairer sex at a bar. I used to think there was a way to do this. I've developed the more nuanced and realistic approach that there must be an awful lot of ways to do this, what with everyone being different. However, any past success I have had in this has been a) totally fortuitous, b) fifteen years ago, and c) arguably partly based on the physique I had back then. Part of the problem may be that conversation is a tricky beast, but an equally large part is that people are often remarkably tedious.

Yes, we monomaniacs find polymaniacs as boring as they find us: football has never been, is not, and will never be in any way interesting; soap operas are markedly less fascinating than paint drying on a wall, as at least one can read a book as the paint dries, without it droning into your ears. And so on. I suppose the main difference is managing to fake interest by nodding along when people talk about Mourinho or whatever, as I have done twice this past week. On Monday, mind you, I heard a contemporary jockey's name, and thought him a seventies snooker player, so expect no more than a facade if you talk to me about such things.

In closing, I hope you've had an easier year of it than I have,* and I rather selfishly hope I get one of those easier years for myself next cycle round the sun. Merry Christmas to you all, and a Happy New Year.

* Sometimes people take such statements as "I have suffered worse than any other human! Pity me!" Don't be silly; don't take it that way.

Remembrance

This post should have gone up earlier today, but something seems to have gone awry.

I picked up the Great War boardgame the other week, and have just got the BEF ready in time for 11th November. The Germans are still being painted. A few pictures are below. If you look closely, you can see I have mislaid one of the members of the HMG teams. Not too bothered, as I plan to pick up some more of these chaps. Lovely to paint, these little fellows. Setting gaming aside, this is a day to remember the loss of those who died. Wilfred Owen reminds us of the tragedy that was that Great War.

Dulce et Decorum Est

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

From top to bottom, from bed to hilltop

I have not been posting often for a few reasons. My depression resurfaced for a while. Work became busier, and my ability to deal with that properly was impacted by the depression. I have also been working on a colossal project. When I work on large projects I have a great tendency to get them half done, then abandon them. Things are always more interesting in my head than they turn out to be in reality. I have also experienced that loss of interest in wargaming I had hitherto only read of, and regarded as inexplicable. So what you are about to see has dragged on since at least midway through May.

The one thing I do not blame is the weather. It has only recently taken a turn for the worse. The kitchen has an aga. Agas put out heat all the time. Heat rises. My bedroom is situated above the kitchen. Since many readers are American, I should explain that not only are traditional British houses not designed to be cool, nor do they have air conditioning. Even when I was thin, I burned hot, so to speak, and now I am fat, and my workspace is warmer still, lethargy is almost inevitable.

To business. I had slept for decades on the same mattress, a simple foam affair. For many months sleep was possible only in bursts of a few hours at a time, and waking up meant attempting to dislodge my shoulder from its odd desire to implant itself in my neck. I saved money. I bought a new mattress. The shoulder is less naughty now, though I suspect the only true solution is to lose a few stone (fourteen pounds to the stone, Americans. 454g to the pound, Metric-users). Some would suggest lying on my back, not my side, but I had to do that in 2011 after my appendix was removed, and I assure such attentive people that it is impractical advice. This left me with a piece of foam sufficient to cover a Kingsize bed.

On  its own, the foam is far too soft for any purposes. So I affixed it to a 4' by 2' by 18mm piece of chipboard, adding multiple layers, each about 5" thick, until I had a towering monstrosity, which I am only able to move with difficulty. It is not the weight, but the bulk and my desire not to bash it as I move it, that makes me concerned for its mobility. I tracked a marker across the beast to remind myself where to cut, then with Stanley knife and carving knife set to work. I applied a layer of papier-mâché to the foam, and allowed it to dry. I then hacked out a few more areas to make the surfaces less regular. I did this after applying the papery cover as it was - perversely - easier to cut through that and the foam rather than just the foam. I replaced the missing papery bits, then applied sand. There followed a layer of filler.

Then came a brown undercoat. I went over some missing areas a few days later, and I have just now applied two successively lighter drybrushes of creamy-brown and cream to the edifice. A lot of little things are still to come, but perhaps they may come more quickly if I write and post this now.

Two centuries after the battle

It has unavoidably been a while since my last post. More on that at some future date. For now in the darkening evening, I just wanted to share a few images of Waterloo. Photographer Sam Faulkner has been photographing re-enactors with the aim of giving some idea of what the soldiery of the nations would have looked like after the battle. Here is the link. As well as that, a more traditional image of part of the battle that day, Scotland Forever! In Memoriam.